A friend of mine told me he experienced something similar to this under the influence of LSD. He said after a hour or so after he took it he was suddenly struck by the reality of a dessert knife he was holding in his hand -- the feel of the handle and blade, its appearance. Believing he suddenly understood an emptiness feeling he was experiencing he thought, "Now I know: I exist -- the world exists -- and I know that the world exists." He was totally overcome by the bare reality of existence. Afterwards he saw himself examining a stone on the seashore, the root of a chestnut tree, and some other objects, having taken aback by a revelation that exposed the things as pure existence rather than the "essence" of what they were.

LSD offers vast possibilities of accelerated learning and scientific/scholarly research, but for initial sessions, intellectual reactions can become traps. "Turn your mind off" is the best advice for novitiates. After you have learned how to move your consciousness around -- into ego loss and back, at will -- then intellectual exercises can be incorporated into the psychedelic experience. The objective is to free you from your verbal mind for as long as possible.

Forget about LSD -- if you're really serious about a transpersonal entheogenic experience you've to try ketamine. The dissolution of boundaries between the self and external reality is so profound that you're assured the mystical exprerience is gonna be life-changing.

An ecstatic state similar to those described in the ancient mystical traditions of Eastern philosophies and Western religions, this peak experience includes deep feelings of joy and serenity, awareness of becoming a non-physical being, out-of-body experiences, re-experiencing the birth process, vivid dreams and memories of past incarnations, encounters with archetypal beings, visits to mythological realms of consciousness, experience of psychological death and rebirth of ego and feelings of cosmic unity with humanity, nature, the universe and God.

Exactly! Economic reforms may play a role of importance in attempting to defeat the death instinct on a social level, but no reform can end aggression; only deflate it and allow civilization to continue without the nihilistic ourbursts of war.

For Freud, for instance, individuals are by nature aggressive. His theory of aggression is imbedded in his psychoanalytic theories. The theory of aggression is derived from two themes: the relations between the id, ego, and superego, and the conflict between the life instinct -- Eros -- and the death instinct -- Thanatos. Individuals are born with -- as -- an 'id', raw desire for satisfaction and pleasure. But not all desires can be satisfied, especially for an infant. And desires must be satisfied by following some process; fulfillment is not automatic. So the id develops, for its satisfaction in light of reality, an 'ego' -- the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world through the medium of the [perceptual consciousness]... seeking to bring the influence of the external world to bear upon the id and its tendencies, and endeavours to substitute the reality principle for the pleasure principle which reigns unrestrictedly in the id. The ego remains, in a sense, part of the id, but it has concerns other than wish-fulfillment; it seeks to gratify the id in the context of what is possible in reality.

The development of the 'superego' is more complicated; the superego is generated through the Oedipus complex. At a very early age the little boy develops an object-cathexis for his mother, which originally related to the mother's breast... the boy deals with his father by identifying himself with him... until the boy's sexual wishes in regard to his mother become more intense and his father is perceived as an obstacle to them... His identification with his father... changes into a wish to get rid of his father in order to take his place with his mother. The child is ambivalent about his father: he wants both to be him, and to kill him. To resolve this crisis, the child uses the strength derived from identification with the father to forbid himself to seek that which is his father's domain -- that is, the mother. This self-forbidding creates the superego, which always exists in regard to the ego as a father to a child: dominant and prohibitory. Since the restrictions exercised on the child by the father are almost invariably the moral injunctions of the society, other moral authorities inform the superego in its attempt to police the ego. These become one's morals, which are then passed to one's children.

But the id, ego, and superego are only the channelers of forces. The forces themselves, the life and death instincts, are the second part of the story: we put forward the death instinct, the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state; on the other hand, we suppose that [the life instinct], by bringing about a more a more far-reaching combination of the particles into which living substance is dispersed, aims at complicating life and at the same time, of course, of preserving it. The life instincts push the individual toward prior states of living matter; the death instinct pushes an individual toward a state prior to living matter. The life instinct provides the source of an individual's libido and drive for happiness, people strive after happiness, they want to become happy and to remain so. But the death instinct counters by providing the source of one's aggressive and violent tendencies: a portion of the death instinct is diverted towards the external world and comes to light as an instinct of aggressiveness and destructiveness. But the goal of the death instinct is not the destruction of things external to the organism, but the organism itself. So aggression and destruction are still aberrant.

However, in this way the instinct itself could be pressed into the service of Eros, in that the organism was destroying some other thing... rather than destroying its own self. Aggression is the death instinct controlled by Eros. While the death instinct seeks the destruction of the organism, the ego can redirect its force at an external object. But the force is not lessened thereby. It is but moved -- conversely, any restriction of this aggressiveness directed outwards would be bound to increase the self-destruction, which is in any case proceeding. The death instinct will destroy; the only question is what. Eros can direct it outwards for self-preservation.

But this is the problem. Eros also seeks to bring communities together; to increase the scale of cooperation -- civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Eros, then, drives toward happiness and a larger scale of cooperation, while the death instinct drives toward an individual's dissolution into inorganic matter. To maintain its happiness, the organism forces the destructive force outward, away from itself. But this violates the greater social order which Eros establishes. So the death instinct is forced back inwards as guilt -- the superego torments the sinful ego with the same feeling of anxiety and is on the watch for opportunities of getting it punished by the external world. But this will not do, for the ego wishes to satisfy the desires of the id, and so it redirects the aggression outward. If it fails to force the aggression outward, it bottles it up and may become neurotic, depressed, suicidal. It if fails to hold the aggression in, it will again be punished by the superego for having violated social norms, but here the superego has less force to project inwards. Because of this, one's neighbor is for one not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts one to satisfy one's aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him.... This is the factor which disturbs our relations with our neighbour and which forces civilization into such a high expenditure of energy.

This is, for Freud, the explanation of war: a massive outpouring of the death instinct in organized group violence.

Looks like someone can't make up his mind .. bad ass, good ass, bad ass, good ass...

I became acquainted with the psychological power of zero in doing a meditation technique called holotropic breathing, or simply breathwork. In holotropic breathing, the participant engages in deep, rhythmic breathing while listening to a carefully chosen suite of very loud music. The participant often achieves a trance-like state, with vivid images. Sometimes the images are abstract. Sometimes the images are very real. They may consist of reliving certain life experiences, having conversations with long-dead ancestors, or having fantastic experiences such as being in the midst of a Civil War battle or dancing in a harem. As the music begins to slow down and become quieter and sweeter, there is often a powerful emotional release.

Somewhere during the breathwork I've experienced, I come to a point at which time and space have totally collapsed. I am at zero: there is no time, and there is no space. What is most powerful about this experience is that, at this zero point, there are no temporal or spatial constraints -- whatever the "I" is that is experiencing this can go anywhere in time and space. In fact, the "I" has disappeared into the zero. Or it's as I have been divided by zero and have become undefinable.

We might think that, in ordinary geometrical space, three dimensions is about as real as we can get. Two dimensions constrain us to thinking about a plane; one dimension is simply a line. But when we hit zero dimensions, we're at a single, dimensionless point: all constraints fall away.

2-dimensional renderings (i.e., flat drawings) of a 0-dimensional point, a 1-dimensional line segment, a 2-dimensional square, a 3-dimensional cube, and a 4-dimensional tesseract.

The negative (fractal) dimension is introduced by Benoit Mandelbrot, in which, when it is positive gives the known definition, and when it is negative measures the degree of "emptiness" of empty sets.